Protecting the United States and her allies
Decision superiority at the tactical edge.
Dresden Codex builds products to augment decision making, tighten the kill chain, and enable the warfighter.
The Challenge
Data in a sensor-driven environment overloads decision making, but also provides an immense opportunity for actionable intelligence.
Our mission is to make analytical reasoning and decision making faster and more precise, so the U.S. can win today and tomorrow.
Lineage
The Evolution of Decision Making
1949
Sherman Kent argues in print that analysis is a research discipline, not a byproduct.
1951
National Intelligence Estimate 29-51: Kent assessed that there was “a serious possibility” that Soviets would invade Yugoslavia in 1951. Policy makers thought “serious possibility” meant a 20% chance while Kent believed it was 65%. This was the beginning of Estimative Language.
1962
Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62 concluded that the Soviets would not install strategic missiles in Cuba because it was too risky and out of character. In fact, Soviet ships already had delivered substantial military equipment and medium-range ballistic missiles.
1973
The “Konzeptziya Bias”: Israeli military intelligence failed to incorporate data that disproved their working hypothesis that Arab nations would not dare to launch a war without first achieving air superiority.
1999
Richards J. Heuer maps cognitive bias onto the intelligence cycle.
2001–2021
Two decades of irregular warfare narrow the discipline to find, fix, finish. Analysis optimizes for locating individuals rather than multi-domain missions against peer threats.
2003
Iraq's WMD program is judged with “high confidence”. The failure is analytic, not collection.
2007
ICD 203 codifies analytic standards and a common estimative language for likelihood & confidence.
2022
Russia's invasion of Ukraine exposes a new state of warfare. Commercial imagery, cheap sensors, and disposable drones make the battlefield transparent and collapse sensor-to-shooter timelines into minutes.
2023
Hamas attacks from Gaza on 7 October, fifty years and a day after Yom Kippur. Warning indicators were held and discounted against a standing assessment that the threat was deterred.
2023
Peer and near-peer competitors close the gap on platforms and access. Overmatch now rests on hybrid warfare augmented by an information advantage.
2024
Non-state and irregular actors generate pressures equivalent to a pacing threat at a fraction of the cost.
2025
Dresden Codex founded to augment the analyst under pressure and under uncertainty.
The U.S. wins and dominates the next generation of warfare through sustained overmatch.
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